School of Social Sciences and Philosophyhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/20
School of Social Science and Philosophy

2019-03-21T18:33:01ZConfronting global capital: Trade union organising for higher wages in Cambodia's garment and footwear industryhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/86087
Confronting global capital: Trade union organising for higher wages in Cambodia's garment and footwear industry
CICHON, DAVID
After almost a decade of declining wages in Cambodia’s garment and footwear industry, worker incomes have steadily improved since 2013. Minimum wages increased from 80USD a month to 170USD a month in just 4 years, an average annual increase of almost 13% above inflation. This is an unusual and unexpected development for the global garment and footwear industry because power imbalances across the supply chain strongly favour capital over labour. The highly competitive environment has allowed brands and retailers to reduce the prices they pay to suppliers which in turn has led to suppressed wage growth for workers. This thesis is interested in how these structural barriers can be overcome and so the core research question addressed here is how are trade unions and their allies organising for higher wages in the Cambodian garment and footwear industry? The research is based on a global ethnographic study design, which enabled an in-depth engagement with global and national trade unions and the wider network of activists and organisations working on improving wages in Cambodia. Data was gathered through in-depth interviews, participant observation during trade union strategy workshops and protests, attendance at the International Labour Conference and engagement with the new ACT initiative on living wages, as well as garment and footwear factory visits. The thesis shows how the Cambodian wage campaign in 2013/2014 was successful because the national trade unions and NGOs together with a network of global activists engaged in a well-coordinated, confrontational, global campaign demanding that brands and retailers, as the most powerful actors in the supply chain, deliver higher wages. The research argues that in the aftermath of the campaign, however, the Cambodian state began to develop a ‘hegemonic labour control regime’. Under this regime trade unions are asked to partake and consent to the reformed, but state controlled minimum wage setting process while simultaneously being restricted in their abilities to strike, demonstrate and organise workers. The research further explored the pathways through which global unions and NGOs supported the wage campaigning and industrial relations work in Cambodia, arguing that decades of global campaigning have led to a transformation in the understanding of responsibility in global supply chains. This has culminated in the ongoing attempt by IndustriALL and a group of brands to develop a supply chain industrial relations framework on wages through the Action Collaboration and Transformation (ACT) process. The ACT process is examined in detail in the Cambodian context. Finally, the thesis examines how the various ‘campaign coalitions’ between national and global unions and national and global NGOs, which were so effective in 2014, deteriorated and transformed as the focus shifted from a confrontational campaign to engagement in industrial relations institutions. The thesis concludes by arguing that effective coordination between national and global trade unions and national and global labour NGOs is important in building leverage across the entire global supply chain and pressuring brands and retailers, factory owners and states into a position where the structural barriers to higher wages in global garment and footwear manufacturing can be overcome. This is crucial if supply chain industrial relations frameworks like ACT are to deliver sustained and substantial improvements for workers.
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2019-01-01T00:00:00ZAccountability and the Democratic Mandate: Analysing Pledges, Party Competition, Media Coverage, and Public Opinionhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/86085
Accountability and the Democratic Mandate: Analysing Pledges, Party Competition, Media Coverage, and Public Opinion
M?LLER, STEFAN
This dissertation examines electoral accountability and the democratic mandate by reassessing the concept of election pledges, by analysing when parties emphasise the present and past rather than the future, by classifying media coverage of political promises, and revealing the circumstances under which parties lose public support during the electoral cycle. In the first paper, I revisit the scholarly conceptualisation of election pledges. Comparing the most extensive expert reliability exercise to the coding of crowd workers reveals that the experts have a much narrower perception of election promises. Besides raising awareness for differences in the understanding of pledges, the paper exemplifies how crowd coding can be used to reassess established concepts. The second paper introduces the difference between prospective and retrospective campaign communication. Using quantitative text analysis, I uncover the circumstances under which parties emphasise the past and present, and when parties instead focus on the future. I show that large parts of manifestos do not address the future at all. As hypothesised, governments employ more positive language only in statements about the past and present. Incumbents and opposition parties are almost equally positive when it comes to describing the future. The third paper investigates how the media report on campaign promises. The analysis of almost 500,000 statements about promises across 33 electoral cycles in four countries shows that newspaper coverage of promises peaks before elections. The analysis also reveals a substantial negativity bias. These findings help us to understand why voters often struggle to recall the fulfilment of salient pledges and why most citizens do not believe that parties keep their promises. The fourth paper investigates how government support changes throughout the legislative cycle. Based on over 25,000 opinion polls from 171 electoral cycles, I show that government parties, on average, lose most support in the first half of the cycle. Second, the previously assumed curvilinear effect is more likely to occur under single-party government and in countries where the prime minister can dissolve the parliament. Third, since the 2000s, government parties rarely recover from early losses.
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2019-01-01T00:00:00ZOn the same boat: Three essays on the causes of pre-WWI Italian international migrationhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/86078
On the same boat: Three essays on the causes of pre-WWI Italian international migration
TORTORICI, GASPARE
This thesis analyzes the causes of Italian mass international migration before the outbreak of WWI. While each chapter is a stand-alone paper that explores different motives and dynamics, there is a common quantitative core based on Ellis Island administrative records (1892-1912) and official Italian out-migration statistics (1876-1912).
Chapter I is centered on the reconstruction of US-bound out-migration flows from Italian municipalities between 1892 and 1912. The main findings can be summarized as follows. First, international migration followed a process of path-dependency and progressive spatial diffusion at the local level. Second, the further away from a port a given municipality of origin was, the more passengers tended to travel together therefore creating ex-ante networks. Third, cyclical migration was a sizable and widespread phenomenon.
Chapter II - joint with Prof Rowena Gray and Prof Gaia Narciso - investigates the local migration response to international agricultural commodity price shocks during the first globalization era. The paper revolves around the idea that price shocks affect different areas according to their agricultural production structure. We conduct a Fixed-Effects analysis at the province level and find that higher agricultural commodity prices released liquidity constraints thus promoting out-migration. On the other hand, higher volatility translated itself into higher incentives to out-migrate. Results are statistically significant across a battery of robustness checks.
Chapter III - joint with Prof Yannay Spitzer and Ariell Zimran - studies the local migration response to the 1908 Messina and Reggio Calabria earthquake, one of the deadliest and most disruptive natural disasters in European history. The paper is based on a Difference-in-Difference approach coupled with a series of event studies that allow to test the pre-trends hypothesis. We find that the quake only produced a short-lived decline of out-migration rates from affected municipalities - as opposed to non-affected ones - in Calabria. We test two mechanisms: migration networks and damage accumulation. In the former case, we find that there is no statistically significant effect of networks; in the latter, we show how migration decreased more in municipality which had been affected by another earthquake in the recent past.
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2019-01-01T00:00:00ZEmpirical Essays in Economic Geographyhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/86071
Empirical Essays in Economic Geography
AGNEW, KERRI
This thesis consists of three papers that belong to the field of Economic Geography. All
three papers exploit spatial and temporal variation in variables in order to shed light on
economic questions. The first paper provides an empirical analysis of the effect of
fluctuations in the nominal exchange rate on cross-border shopping on the island of Ireland.
The daily dataset used in the analysis consists of car flows on roads and the exchange rate
during 2013-17. The results are that when the Euro appreciates by 1%, car flow into
Northern Ireland on the average border crossing rises by 2% between 9am and 3pm. This
paper provides the first known causal analysis of exchange rate movements and incentives
to shop across the border outside of the North American context. The second paper
provides an empirical analysis of the effect of motorway connections on burglary rates. The
dataset used in the analysis is an annual panel of 562 Police Sub Districts in the Republic of
Ireland during 2004-15. The results are, that on average, connection to the motorway
network causes a 10% rise in the burglary rate during the year of connection. This paper
shows for the first time that major road construction affects the spatial distribution of crime.
The third paper provides an empirical analysis of the causal effect of employment on
housing prices. It does this by using a dataset of housing prices and employment in foreign
owned firms in the Republic of Ireland during 2007-13. The results show that 1-2 years
after 1,000 jobs have been created, monthly rents in nearby properties are 0.5%-1% higher,
and the effect on prices is at least 2%. This study presents the first known causal estimates
of employment changes on housing prices.
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2019-01-01T00:00:00Z